


good - alternatively, goodbye

by orphan_account



Category: Camp Camp (Web Series)
Genre: Bullying, Child Abuse, Heavily implied suicide, Heavy Character Speculation, Nihilism, This is not Happy, implied depression, vent - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 10:07:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13924896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “They will lie straight through their flawlessly white teeth about how much they care about your wellbeing, then let the truth slip the moment you turn a cold shoulder to their nuclear bullshit, the moment your doubt manifests.”A timeline of people telling Max to be good. One morning, he comes to a consensus.





	good - alternatively, goodbye

**Author's Note:**

> this is 100% vent 
> 
> uh don’t expect anything other than certified smax, sad max 
> 
> guess where I wrote this!! McDonalds. I.... i hate McDonald’s...... blame the CORPORATION for this......

“Can't you be **good** , you little ungrateful shit?”

The crack of the bottle against his child cranium is deafening, the smell of coppery blood intoxicating to the metallic whiff, the entire weight of Max’s body hitting the floor as his skin breaks and red slicks the dirty hardwood.

Maybe he was five years old, but his Mom claims that sometimes you just have to hit your children that you promise you love. It's the only way to teach them. It's the best brand of love, the love that leaves Max shuddering in his bed with a bandage obscuring his vision, head trauma making nausea tingle right at the base of his throat, quiet sniffles echoing throughout the room as he clutches Mr. Honeynuts close to his stomach. That was never the love he wanted. It was the careless train wreck of a mangled love he deserved.

“You’re not **good** at anything, weak little bitch!”

The shattering of a heart swelled with hope is all that Max can feel, the curl of his fingers around the picture he had drawn so enthusiastically, colored so diligently, clutched so confidently even when he was wracked with nervous tremors falling limp. The soundlessness of the paper fluttering onto the floor filled the room like a toxic fume that made Max choke up as tears rush down his face without hesitation. The accompanying, consequential shove that follows sends him sprawling across the recess dirt, his hair filling with the filth of the ground, his hands scraping open and bloody on the rough edges.

Sure, he was six years old and he’d worked so hard to impress the judgemental eyes of the peers who teased him so stubbornly only to taste bitter defeat in the form of a one eighty in perspective and hydrogen peroxide bubbling upon his wounds, but he just shouldn't try. The world was unraveling before him and he was picking at the universe’s viscera with curious eyes, eyes that saw every truth laid out on a platform, eyes that drip pearlescent tears and dry up in the same time. It sinks in like the slow moving poison. That this life was so cruel and not a damn thing he did would ever matter in this grand scheme, would just become another passing time before the ever stretching blackness of nonexistence collapsed upon him.

“Hopeless kid, **good** for nothing except causing trouble…”

And those teachers thought that their mumbles could escape ears that absorbed all (as if to only amplify the pain of an endless cycle he’d been forcefully dragged into, a price to pay for breathing when he’d rather be suffocating, but that's not his choice, nothing is anymore unless he screams at the top of his lungs), and it's so hard to maintain anything in this state of constant unease and discontent. As one hell ends, another nightmare trek begins, his teeth grind against each other in a screech that only Max can hear. It fills his own head and plays on repeat as he tears completed homework after completed homework out of his bright yellow binder and throws it into the toilet.

Of course, he's eight and even those who smile and reach a hand towards you, instill a false sense of security, will retch their wretchedly wicked hand back at the first flicker of hapless hesitation or abnormality, at the first sign of a conflict that a Spider-Man bandage and a Magic Tree House novel won't fix. They will lie straight through their flawlessly white teeth about how much they care about your wellbeing, then let the truth slip the moment you turn a cold shoulder to their nuclear bullshit, the moment your doubt manifests. It's a lesson that Max learns then, that no one can escape being human. And humans are apathetic assholes playing off their God complexes with fake humbleness. And humans are depressed, suicidal eight year olds stuck in a wheel like an imprisoned hamster, fantasizing about leaping off of buildings. And humans are oblivious bastards blessed with blissfully empty heads and empty hearts, like the shell of a man with no future.

“For once, Max, can't you just be… **good**?”

There's a flame inside his stomach that dies out at the implication and Max is trying to rev it backup, conjure a witty response, because without it he's so scared to death of the vicious cold settling inside of him. It's like trying to light up wet firewood without anything but a soaked pack of matches and a mouth that's still fumbling idiotically for words. A minute stretches out to an hour and the brunt of his life settles in like an intestine deep grime no soap could ever scrub out. The tough love. The day he stopped caring. The day he realized no one cared. On their own, they were a menace to his mental state. In one long ass minute, they were mental fucking destruction ringing loud enough for his skull to vibrate. His past tastes like a mouthful of expired milk squished together with dumpster water behind his teeth.

Then, time resumes. There was no more lessons to learn. Max. He's just a fucking asshole. He's ten years old and he's figured out the meaning of life and he's never going to be good. _Good_ was a relative concept, a walking contradiction, a controversial, backwards word, but Max could never be applied to it in any context.

Well, now he's fourteen and he's thinking about all of the times he figured he could never be good, all the times he's acknowledged the devil staring back at him from the reflection in the dirt caked mirror (from the dark bags beneath freakishly green eyes to an unwashed tangle of black curls to lips that didn't know how to crack a smile without bleeding from the foreign expression contorting villainous flesh), all of the times he's walked into a room and watched every happy face fade to a jaded, uncomfortable blur, every perfect thing he's doubted, every bruise he caused from pushing people away, every tear at the foundation of someone else's bright world he's executed so haphazardly, the fires he's started, -

None of it’s worth mentioning. Him and _good_? They were cut from the same cloth as mirror opposites. He's never loved the world, he's never loved, he's never saw the big picture, but now he sees the chance to be bigger than himself. Yeah, they were cut from the same cloth, him and good. And he knows how to use a gun like he knows how to play with fire, with his green eyes dry.

He's never been good a day in his damn life but right now, in this moment, as the sun flits into his room and casts sparkling licks of yellow over his brown skin, as his steady finger finds solace on the trigger and his thumb flicks the safety off like it's the only thing he's ever been meant to do, as he regards his cold, merciless self and the first blood he’ll ever honest to god have on his hands is his own, he breathes. He breathes the first breath he's ever deserved in his life. All these years, and he holds it in like a drowning man when he's never been closer to the surface ever. For all the oxygen he's wasted, he exhales one final sentence with a smile on his lips. He has one chance to do some good.

“I’ll be good.”

Max was a dying wildfire, and the rain pours heavy upon him. He’d burned enough, hadn’t he? This turn of events was

 

good.


End file.
